What About the Inequity in Power?
You know what, I never thought about inequity in such specific terms before I read an article by Cato’s Arnold Kling reprinted from the Orange County Register (Click here for whole article). Here’s a little excerpt:
I want to focus on American excess in terms of political power. As unseemly as it is for America’s wealthiest people to strive for more money, America’s political class is far worse. They have a ridiculous excess of power, and yet they only want more.
Montgomery County, Md., has an annual budget of $3.8 billion. This sum is under the control of a County Council with nine members. On an average per-politician basis, each County Council member controls just over $400 million a year in spending.
To put an annual spending figure of $400 million in perspective, consider this: if you had $8 billion in assets and earned 5 percent per year on those assets, that would give you $400 million in annual income. And few Americans have that much. The world’s wealthiest person is Warren Buffett, with $62 billion (admittedly he has often been able to earn more than 5 percent per year from investments). Bill Gates has $58 billion. Fewer than 40 Americans have more than $8 billion in assets, and their names are largely familiar to us – the Waltons of Wal-Mart, Sergie Brin and Larry Page of Google, and so on.
Can you name the members of the County Council in Montgomery County, Md.? I can’t name very many of them, and I live there. Still, getting elected to the County Council in Montgomery County, which is pretty far down the ladder in terms of political power in the United States, enables you to control more annual spending than the wealth of Donald Trump or Steve Jobs.
(Editor’s note: Orange County has a budget of roughly $6 billion, overseen by five county supervisors – or $1.2 billion in spending per supervisor. Los Angeles County’s 2007-08 budget is about $21 billion, overseen by five supervisors – or more than $4 billion per supervisor.)
At the federal level, the budget is $3 trillion. If you divide that by 535 (the number of senators and representatives), then, on average, each legislator controls over $5 billion in spending per year. That is more than even the world’s richest person could spend annually.
Isn’t this just rich? We have hundreds of liberal and some “conservative” politicians decrying the inequities of our capitalistic system. They deride the rich for having more power than the rest of us but the truth elegantly exposes this insidious misdirection.
Yes, the rich do have more power than the average person but politicians, even small-fries from Montgomery County, have more power than all but the richest people in the world. IN THE WORLD!
You know what - I don’t think Mr. Kling goes quite far enough with this specific comparison. He’s right, politicians do control a lot of money. And I’ll even accept the fact that they control all the money that they spend.
But what about the high-level bureaucrat? Or the legislative aide? These people, by virtue of their being liked by an elected official, also have power over a substantial parts of the budget. We don’t just have 535 power brokers in Washington, we have tens of thousands of power brokers.
How is our government all that different than feudalism? We have an aristocracy with differing levels of power. There are kings and queens and counts and lords. And, of course, we are the serfs. Even people like Warren Buffett are serfs. Yeah, higher level serfs, but when you break it down they probably spend a heck of a lot less money every year than even lowly county council members do.
As of yet we have completely ignored the biggest source of power for governmental officials. The power to dictate how we live our lives. Again from Mr. Kling:
The monetary comparisons only scratch the surface of the inequality and excesses of political power in the United States. Bill Gates might be said to control as much money as a member of the County Council where I live. But he does not have the power to, say, tell the people of the county where they can and cannot smoke, or to tell local businesses what wages they must pay their workers, or to decide whether a local concert venue will be devoted to folk music or to rock.
Wealthy people do not control the curriculum in our children’s schools. Politicians do. Wealthy people do not set licensing requirements for everything from doctors to interior designers to hair stylists to manicurists. Politicians do.
Can the Waltons force you to shop at their store? No, but Councilman Nobody can force them out of their little fiefdom. Can Bill Gates force you to use Vista? No, but federal prosecutors can sue him for making too much money in their opinion.
Our local boils on our asses can decree where we smoke, drink, speak, what we can drive, how we live our lives. Somebody who got 5,000 votes has a much bigger affect on our lives than someone who has to make 50,000,000 customers happy.
The next time your lefty buddy starts to cry about the extreme gap in earnings between the wealthiest and the poor you need to retort back with the exponentially greater gap between the power of politicians and the average guy. BigT
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